Computer Literacy

I took CIS 1020 in the Spring of 2009 to satisfy the Computer Literacy requirement. Students in this class have to complete a final project. Mine was a Keynote presentation that incorporates elements such as text, graphics, and the representation of data. Here’s my project:

This project exemplifies my ability to communicate effectively and is also supporting evidence that I have developed quantitative literacy. Let me explain. Part of communicating effectively in the 21st century is the ability to convey one’s ideas using appropriate technology. In this project I gathered information and data regarding student retention at SLCC and then had to figure out how best to present it in Keynote, an Apple presentation software. As you can see in SLCC’s Learning Outcomes, the ability to “gather and analyze information and communicate effectively using technology, library resources, and other media” is a key component of effective communication. Apple’s Keynote is very much like Powerpoint, and I had to learn how to enter text, add and format new slides, create tables, and add and arrange graphic elements. My overall goal was to show important retention data for SLCC and how the College is responding to that data. For this project, I interviewed Barbara Grover, who is the College’s Director of Accreditation, Assessment & Planning. That process itself was helpful in developing my interpersonal communication skills.

The Keynote project also allowed me to demonstrate a bit of quantitative literacy in that I had to make sense of student retention data–and understand, for instance, the important differences between raw percentages of students persisting over time and SLCC’s percentile ranking with respect to other institutions. I then had to figure out how to represent the data graphically. For example, I thought it important to make the x-axis go from zero to one hundred percent, rather than truncating it. Keeping the full range visible on the x-axis presents the viewer with an undistorted look at the data.